Do you remember what you were doing in 1987? It was the year the Simpsons appeared for the first time as a series of shorts on The Tracy Ulman Show, Bow Wow was born, and both Larry Bird and Magic Johson were still in the NBA. It also happens to be the year an incident led to the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which was enacted a year later, nearly a decade before Netflix was founded and 16 years before Facebook launched. Yet this quarter-of-a-century old legislation is the reason why Netflix hasn't released a Facebook app in the U.S.

Usually, it takes far-reaching government bills or the mention of DRM to prod geeks into picking up their proverbial torches and pitchforks and expressing outrage en masse, but Wednesday's news of employers asking job applicants for their Facebook passwords caused a crapstorm of Netflix-price like proportions. Turns out, everyday folks aren't the only ones angry about it: a Connecticut Senator and Facebook itself whipped out threats of legislation and lawsuits, respectively, if the privacy-invading practice continues.

We get it, nearly everyone's on Facebook these days, some of whom reveal a little too much about themselves. You should be careful what you post. Why? Because employers check Facebook profiles of prospective job hires; that's old news. Alternately, go nuts with what you post and be selective in the people you allow to view your profile. But what happens when an employer asks for your username and password during a job interview?

A UK court handed down an 8 month sentence this week to a British student convicted of infiltrating Facebook’s internal network. 26 year-old Glenn Mangham hacked into Facebook’s servers from his home in York, England last Spring. Facebook, believing it was the victim of industrial espionage, called in the feds. It didn’t take long to track down Mangham.

An angry father who works in IT didn't appreciate what his daughter had to say in an indignant letter addressed to her parents and posted to Facebook, so he did what every teenage dad has probably fantasized about doing at some point or another. He shot himself (with a video camera) shooting his daughter's laptop several times at point blank range with his trusty .45 while wearing a cowboy hat, and then posted the video to her Facebook Timeline.

For a period of time yesterday, Facebook's value topped $102 billion when 150,000 of the company's Class B common stock traded at $44 each in a private auction hosted by SharesPost. As of this morning, Facebook shares are trading at $42 each in the private market, valuing the social networking site at a slightly less obscene $97.9 billion.

There is a lot of buzz around Facebook’s upcoming IPO. According to some reports, the IPO could create over a 1,000 fresh millionaires, including some highly unlikely ones like graffiti artist David Choe who reluctantly chose to receive Facebook stock in return for a paint job a few years back. That decision is expected to make him richer by as much as $200 million, and consequently a subject of envy far and wide, come Facebook IPO day. But not everyone likes to begrudge accidental millionaires like Choe their unexpected windfalls. There is no dearth of those who believe in creating their own windfall. Marianne Oleson, a 46-year-old resident of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, is one such person.

The Facebook IPO is not just long awaited, but one of the most interesting public offerings of our generation. Unlike the countless tech companies that came before it, Facebook doesn’t offer anything tangible; rather it’s simply a platform to help share our private information. This week however we’ve learned ultimately what the market valued this type of service at, and it’s a staggering $75 billion right out of the gate.

Thanks to the wonder of social networking, we're able to catch an early glimpse of PowerColor's upcoming 'LCS HD7970' graphics card. PowerColor posted a photo of the liquid cooled card on its Facebook page with a promise that "Something cool is coming soon!" That "something cool" is a Radeon HD 7970 videocard stripped of its air cooled heatsink and replaced with a single-slot full cover water block from EK Waterblocks.

It’s finally happened — the Facebook IPO is a real thing. No more speculation, no more guess-work. Facebook filed its S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this afternoon indicating its intention to go public with an eye toward raising $5 billion from sales of stock based on a $100 billion valuation.